The release each week of the Top Ten rankings brings out so many emotions: joy ... excitement ... scanning a screen. The exercise of publicizing a list of 10 opinion polls during the winter sports season is very anodyne. And the slow death of salaried media also means there is precious little for the university sports-lovin' mind to read. Starting this week, there will be an effort to shout out the teams whose effort and striving is bringing a little light into the university sports world.

Three up for this week:
Live it, learn it, love it: following university hoops means knowing the seeding criteria for the Final 8.

Over the next six weeks, the goal will be to keep up on the chalk picks for the men's basketball nationals, which are March 9-12 at the arena formerly known as the Halifax Metro Centre. Carleton, of course, is 7-of-8 at winning nationals held in the East Coast, with the only loss coming in their first trip in 2001, when they lost in the quarter-final against McMaster by the margin of a buzzer shot after a disputed out-of-bounds call.

There is a lot of basketball to be played before it becomes evident, once again, that the field is playing for U Sports silver and bronze medals. Out west, did you see what UBC did on the weekend?
The early challenges with seeding appear to be:
  • who ends up as the 2 seed, the OUA runner-up or Canada West champion? That also determines the matchups for Canada West's other representative and the OUA third-place team, assuming it receives the wild card berth. The rules will dictate that RSEQ's winner will be the 6 seed. 
  • how high to seed Dalhousie if the Tigers go in through the front door as AUS champion. Their win against Ryerson was on the road (good for the Tigers), but it was on the first weekend of October (bad for the Tigers).

At this writing (Jan. 30), here's a back-of-the-Starbucks napkin cogitation:
  1. Carleton (OUA representative): Easy pick. Interestingly, since OUA adopted the single-site Final Four in 2010-11, the Ravens have never hosted. 
  2. UBC (Canada West champion): 127 points?! The estimable Howard Tsumura, on his final weekend at The Province, summed up just how in the azure hell the T-Birds did that against Brandon last Friday. Hint: they took 78 shots and sealed Brandon off from the O-boards.
  3. Ottawa (OUA rep): The Gee-Gees could conceivably finish second in RPI even if they lose against Carleton and Ryerson to finish with a 16-3 conference record, while the Rams finish 17-2.

    Those points could come from having two games with the Ravens, plus two games with two other teams which each had two games with the Ravens. That was what I was trying to say late last week.
  4. Dalhousie (AUS champion): The Tigers are a combined 1-4 against Saint Mary's and UNB and 18-3 against the rest of U Sports. The team with the best pace-setting point guard has a huge edge in single-elimination tournaments and well, Dal has Ritchie Kanza Mata
  5. Calgary / Alberta (Canada West rep): Too soon to say, and Saskatchewan is also in the mix.  
  6. McGill (RSEQ champion): The Redmen are the default pick to come out of Quebec due to defense; they haven't let anyone break 80 all season, including NCAA teams in exhibitions. Concordia is intriguing; 1-2 against McGill and held its own against mid-level OUA competition in October.
  7. Brock (at large): Consider this the spoils of Brock defeating Ryerson last Friday, prevailing 74-65 in front of 3,000-plus in St. Catharines, not a statement of who's better. Most of the RPI scenarios point to the Badgers nestling into the No. 4 spot in the OUA bracket. The team which has to play Carleton on Friday could end up being fresher for a bronze-medal game against the vanquished from a Ryerson-Ottawa semifinal.

    Ryerson was just off in that game (7-for-37 on triples as they played from behind), and that happens. Their Carleton/Ottawa trip on Feb. 17-18 could be really good preparation for the postseason.
  8. Saint Mary's (host): The half of the bracket with Dal also gets the other AUS team for the evening draw on the first night of the tournament.
Please feel free to disagree. There will be several more tries to get this right. Here's the seeding criteria:

Tethering can create its own set of problems. For instance, I recently moved to Toronto, which entails sharing a place where to put it diplomatically, the shared wi-fi connection is not strong. That means tethering to the phone to watch a video and consequently, my cell phone bill will be about $50 higher this month.

Ontario University Athletics, of course, tweaked the basketball RPI-offs, so- called, to make all games count in the standings. That could be read as a response to what happened on the men's side last season. The RPI only included games among playoff teams, remember. Ryerson grabbed first place since its loss to Guelph did not count because those Gryphons, with nine wins in the conference, were on the sideline whilst Laurentian (6-13, third in the North behind Ottawa and Carleton) and Toronto (5-14, third in the East led by Ryerson) participated. Unintended consequences come in threes: the bracket had to be revised York, which had initially qualified, forfeited games for using an ineligible player.

The logic of the change sounds like, make all games matter again. Another complaint that was addressed was that coaches wanted a better idea about potential playoff opponents, so the one-through-17 table became a season-long reference point. It is admirable that this is a level of sport that sees the playoff format as a living document that can be updated quickly and promptly.

While it's an at-large playoff format (rather than divisional), using RPI tethers to the lodestar(s) in its division. Who knows, perhaps Nipissing and Laurentian should get a few bonus percentage points as a trade-off for being tag-teamed twice a year by Carleton and Ottawa.


Winnipeg's Antoinette Miller leads the conference in assists and is fourth in scoring and steals. (Kelly Morton photo)
The release each week of the Top Ten rankings brings out so many emotions: joy ... excitement ... scanning a screen. The exercise of publicizing a list of 10 opinion polls during the winter sports season is very anodyne. And the slow death of salaried media also means there is precious little for the university sports-lovin' mind to read. Starting this week, there will be an effort to shout out the teams whose effort and striving is bringing a little light into the university sports world.
  • Winnipeg Wesmen women's basketball, ranked No. 8. Given what happened to the original incarnation of the Jets it is just that a point guard from Phoenix, fourth-year Antoinette Miller, has come north to lead the Wesmen's rise from the ashes. Is that Nantzed enough? A team which missed the playoffs last season is now 20-2 overall, with a nation's-best .909 winning percentage. With Miller, two Europeans and nine locals, several of whom played for coach Tanya McKay on provincial teams, the Wesmen embody the Canada West model of roster building.

    Back in the '90s, Winnipeg was a very famous women's basketball team. There was the 88-win streak that tied UCLA's North American all-divisions record(and since surprassed by the Connecticut Huskies of Kia Nurse fame), along with a national title three-peat from 1993-95. After taking over in 1996, McKay kept the winning times extant with a run of bronze, silver, bronze and silver at the nationals from 2001 to '04. The recent years have been something of a tranquil period, with zero playoff victories since 2009.
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